JENNIFER MARTELLI

Three Gorges

I’ll tell you my mother had three children,
all girls. We grew, to our father’s dismay,
into bleeding things: hoarse, hungry, aching.
All three of us stole from him.
My older sister stole his control. My younger,
his love. Me? I took his onyx rosary beads,
his laugh, his tortoiseshell bowl.
We lived in a house surrounded by low
fat bushes: juniper, toxic yew, andromeda
with her paper drama mask buds.
I didn’t want him to look at me any more
than he absolutely had to. Now, grown,
I text my sisters photos of women
in threes: three greedy girl ghosts
full of shame, three women transformed into
deep gorges with a river like a blue snake
crawling, three women transformed
into three wolves, three gun-metal wolves
who gorged on three women.

To keep me from wandering off, my mother told me

two women fought with coat hangers down at Filene’s Basement.
They’d grabbed the same dress from the tangle of satin
during the Running of the Brides sale: a back buttoned
ivory lace thing you could alter to fit any size. They swung

the wire hangers so the hooks could catch skin: one woman
aimed for the lower blue-lined eyelid; the other snagged a tuft
of the black lacquered updo. This caused the nest of spiders
living in her hair to scramble down her back and across

the tiled floor into the deep bins of loose silk underwear:
camisoles, slips, bras. No, wait—the spiders were sewn
into the satin lining of the coats on their 25th markdown day,
before they’re sent to the poor. Or were those snake eggs

warmed and ready to hatch within the wool? No matter—
they would bite some woman who would die from the venom.
My mother and I rode the subway on Thursdays. I could ride
for free then, straight into the Basement. I feared my mother

would get bitten by the snake or the spiders hiding in the bins
she pawed through for a bargain. I feared those women, too,
who stripped down to their demi-slips, their garter belts and stockings,
to try on these steals. One had a mole on her stomach. One had a bruise
on her thigh that crawled with blue veins.

Jennifer Martelli (she, her, hers) is the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks All Things are Born To Change Their Shapes, winner of the Small Harbor Press open reading and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The Tahoma Literary Review, Jet Fuel Review, Verse Daily, Iron HorseReview (winner of the Photo Finish contest), and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.